The City College Academic Senate has approved a position paper laying out a number of concerns and recommendations related to the use of generative artificial intelligence.
The body voted on the paper at its regular meeting on Monday, April 14, and Senate President Mona Alsoraimi-Espiritu presented it to the San Diego Community College District Board of Trustees on Thursday, April 17.
The paper, which is based on the findings of the Academic Senate’s AI in Academia Workgroup, promotes a well-rounded conversation about AI. The hope is to address the problems created by the tech, rather than just the opportunities it creates.
The workgroup outlined 14 areas of concern. Some are broad ethical considerations — such as environmental impacts and issues surrounding intellectual property and privacy — but the majority focus on misuse of AI by students, which the paper defines as use that replaces thinking, misrepresents automatically generated work as original or conflicts with a teacher’s instructions.
The paper goes on to lay out 14 recommended policies for the college and district to adopt.
The group stressed it is not preventing instructors from using AI or having students use it when appropriate, but they are concerned about the impacts the tech is having on education.
“We’ve been talking about students needing to learn AI because they will be at a disadvantage when they go into the workforce if they don’t know it, which might be true,” Alsoraimi-Espiritu said while addressing the board of trustees. “But it’s also true that students who lack literacy skills because AI has taken the front seat also will be disadvantaged.”
Students using AI to complete assignments has become a major issue for teachers, especially in classes with an emphasis on writing.
“I have had to revise my assignments multiple times now because it’s almost, especially in online courses, it’s almost guaranteed that at least two thirds of the class is just literally using AI responses,” Chicano Studies professor Justin Akers said, urging the senate to take action before the vote on April 14.
The senate workgroup began speaking to faculty last spring to understand the issues they were facing. From there, they developed the list of recommended policy changes.
The proposed solutions include adding AI into the school’s plagiarism policy, training for faculty and working with instruction designers to build online curricula that reduce the misuse of these models.
“I think that our recommendations are multi-tiered in a way that will really provide support for instructors,” said Humanities professor Marianne Peterson, who was a member of the working group and helped write the paper.
Peterson believes that this sort of approach is critical to helping teachers reengineer their courses to meet the moment.
Immediate next steps include organizing workshops and updating the online teaching certification to ensure professors are prepared, according Peterson.
A critical step Peterson wants to see taken is incorporating AI into the academic code, which would establish that there are productive and non-productive uses of the tech and give teachers more room to set guidelines.
From there, it is important that teachers address the issue in conversation with students. Peterson believes that most students who rely on AI are not acting maliciously. They are busy, stressed and often not confident in their writing skills. But Peterson is worried that taking shortcuts now will have long-term impacts.
“I feel like many of these programs are actually disempowering our students, in the sense that they are hijacking our students’ process of deep thinking, deep feeling and deep learning, which are all enhanced through writing,” Peterson said. “Writing is sometimes work, but it’s good work and we want our students to have confidence in their own minds and processes and not give their power away to an automated device.”
